All atwitter

Thursday, June 18, 2009

The recent news of Google's settlement with authors and publishers are just great. This has the potential to really transform the Internet as we know it and make it a worldwide (or, for now, US-wide) network for scholarship. That's the kind of world-wide web that every science fiction writer of the 20th century has been envisioning, and, if Google is able to get through the final details of this settlement, we'll finally see the dawn of an internet where knowledge is accessible as easily as porn. And it only took us 40 years.

Friends

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" — was that it? — "I prefer men to cauliflowers" — was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages.